Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
My questions to you guys would be:
a)Do you risk developing the .net or .org?
b)Or keep searching for a .com that is available?
c)Or contact the owner of the XYZdirectory.com and work with them?
Any advice?
But in your case, if you think your new site will be a success (and otherwise why bother), then I would never consider a domain where you could be sending traffic to the .com domain holder. Dotcom's are still generally considered king - and most importantly, the default extension people think about when they type in your (or your competitors) domain.
If the competitive site is just sitting there, the first thing I would do is drop them an email to see if they would be interested in selling the domain. There may be a bargain waiting for you.
If that doesn't work, come up with your own. Despite what you say that all the .com variations are already taken for your industry... They aren't. Not even close.
Take a few hours and list every word that deals with your industry. Then go through a thesaurus and list all the related words for every word on that list. Combine them with a list of popular prefix/suffixes and in no time at all, you'll have several dozen great (and available) .com domains to choose from.
We do this all the time, and although our methods are a bit more automated, we routinely come up with tens of thousands of available .com domains for every industry imaginable.
Prefix/Suffix are common solutions. Just remember when Brett put this site together, there's a strong possibility that webmaster.com was already taken. ;)
Steve
